Millions of surveys, prescriptions, invoices, and other documents are sent back and forth every day. Typically the originator sends a form or other document to a recipient, the recipient fills out or otherwise processes the document, and sends the result back to the originator. Substantial effort and time is spent in the overhead of addressing these documents, tracking their transit, and maintaining audit trails.
Many document management systems have been proposed and implemented. These document management systems include systems that perform form generation, store forms in databases, perform forms filing, optical character recognition (OCR), and handle the coordination of requests with responses. However, these systems do not cross organizational boundaries. Transmitting an invoice or survey or other document from one organization to another requires the use of a standard format, such as paper, e-mail, Word document, web page, etc. Of these formats, paper has the unique property that it can be viewed and modified without digital technology, thus serving as the lowest common denominator for communication.
When paper documents are returned to an organization, they must be reintegrated with the document management system. This process requires some combination of scanning, data entry, and quality assurance. Oftentimes, this work is duplicated at both the sending and receiving organizations.
Of course, many systems exist for processing barcodes and imaging documents. The barcode processing may include scanning a barcode to obtain an identifier, placing images in files using the identifier and performing database lookup operations with the identifier.
A number of document management systems employ clients and servers. Some of these system process barcodes. For example, clients exist that scan barcodes to obtain network addresses and then send documents to those network addresses. Other clients rely on having the document destination be manually entered. Servers in document management systems accept images, process images, and generate responses.